In the Playstation 2 game Victorious Boxers, developed by New Corporation and published by Empire Interactive, you follow a young rookie boxer named Ippo on his way to the top in this difficult but worthy fighter.

With help from his coach, he fights for the title of champion. As Ippo, you start in a run-down gym preparing for a sparring match.  The match sort of acts as a tutorial, allowing you to become comfortable with the controls and camera angles.  Finishing the practice run throws you into true boxing matches.  From there, you work your way up the ladder to the defending champion.  Once you become champion, a new option is unlocked where you defend the title. Each time you beat the game after that, you unlock a new character’s “road to glory.” All together, you end up unlocking nine characters other than Ippo.

The game’s strength is its game play.  It plays similar to the old Mike Tyson’s Punch-out games, except for the fact that the opponents’ patterns are harder to see.  Otherwise, the game is fun to play.  Before each fight, your coach will give you tips as to how your opponent acts in the ring. He may something like, “Your opponent likes to fight up close, so he becomes nervous when fighting someone that hangs away from him.” He’ll also give you a short pep-talk between rounds that will point out how you did in the previous round and what you should do in the coming rounds. These little tips help out a lot in later fights.  Unfortunately, the later fights become extremely hard almost instantly.  All the stages until the semifinals are comfortably easy, and then it felt as if they throw you into a very difficult fight unprepared. Well, whatever happens, it’s quite satisfying to see that right hook connect with the side of your opponent’s face.

The controls can be very frustrating at first, but once you learn them, it gets a little easier. Still at some times they can seem random and unresponsive. The 18-camera angles also have a lot to do with how the controls work. Some of the camera angles can be very confusing to work with, though. To ease the pain, the game allows you to rotate the controls.  So if you were playing with a bird’s-eye view, but left was still making your character go to his left instead of your left, you can go into the options menu and rotate the controls 90 degrees to fit the perspective.

The graphics aren’t spectacular, but they get the point across.  A game like Victorious Boxers doesn’t need exceptional graphics. Besides, better graphics wouldn’t necessarily have made this a better game. The character animation is great.  They move as if they were truly professional boxers.

The best part of the game would have to be the Vs. mode. One downfall is that it can be hard to agree on a camera angle that both of you like, because the camera is very important when trying to play the game well.  In the multiplayer mode, you can pick any of the fighters of the game, which become available as you defeat them in story mode.  Each one has their own strengths and weaknesses, along with their own special moves.  You are also able to pick the ring you fight in, which is unlocked in the same manner.

Game Play: 7.2
It is good, wholesome fun.  Too bad the controls really hurt this score.

Graphics: 7.6
The graphics aren’t even close to what the system can do, but better graphics wouldn’t really help anyway.

Sound: 8.7
Basically, all the sound consists of is music, the audience, punches, and the bells at the end of rounds.  Not much to get wrong here, but it is a little bland.

Difficulty: 8
If you really take the time to learn how to effectively use the ducks and dodges, it’s still hard because the controls still aren’t very user friendly.

Concept: 4
Everything in this game has been done before, and done better, in other boxing games.

Multiplayer: 8.9
The only thing keeping me from rating this higher is the bad camera angles.  You can’t pick a good angle without having one of the players at a disadvantage.

Overall: 7.6
A fairly entertaining game.  If boxing games are your thing, then you should check it out.  Otherwise, you won’t be missing much; there are plenty of other awesome games out for the Playstation 2 right now.